Thursday, 17 June 2010

PIN Numbers And The Greek Masses

When I put my card into the Barclays cashpoint down the hill it asks me for my Personal Identification Number. The NatWest cashpoint on the high street asks me for my PIN Number, which is, of course, a personal identification number number.

I use the term pin number, although I'm not sure why. I don't talk about ISP providers as some do, and I'm faintly amused by the 22,000 results Google turns up for the "Irish IRA". But pin number it is, and pin number, I prophesy, it will remain, like a chipped tea-cup that one has become sentimental about.

The New Scientist invented a term for such repetitions back in 2001. They called it RAS Syndrome, the RAS standing for Redundant Acronym Syndrome. But the habit is far older than that. In 1668 John Dryden was already referring to "the hoi polloi". Polloi is Greek for people and Hoi is Greek for the, so the hoi polloi means the the people. Indeed, his is the first usage cited by the OED.

Yet, Hoi polloi it must remain because if we dropped the hoi we'd lose the lovely rhyme that distinguishes the base peasantry from the hoity toity.

And if you're American and have been wondering what in blazes a cashpoint is, it's the British term for an ATM machine.

The Inky Fool freeing the polloi from the hoi

N.B. I am about to try to tinker with the RSS feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, however to me it is a mystery on a par with the incarnation or the hard question of consciousness. If a post doesn't show up tomorrow could you inform me in the comments? In fact, does anybody know whether turning on smartfeed in feedburner simply consolidates all the feeds into one, and if so does it disrupt those who have already subscribed? RSVP please.

8 comments:

Can't help with the RSS feeds (eek!) - but maybe you can shed some light on Pendle Hill (which hill? yes, witch hill). Someone who lived there told me that 'Pen' means 'hill' in Cumbric and 'dle' or 'dell' is from O'Dell - which in the Old English is 'woad hill'. So Pendle Hill means Hill hill hill? I so WANT this to be true!

Anon, Autology. See here for a previous post on the Grelling-Nelson Paradox.Brokenbiro, I shall get onto that. I know that Usk was Celtic for river and therefore all rivers Usk and Esk are river-river. I believe the same applies to Sahara and Gobi, which both mean desert, making their names desert desert.

Ooh, and doesn't 'Avon' mean 'River' as well? We have one in WA, four others in Australia and plenty more elsewhere. This would give us Stratford-Upon-River, which is not quite as pretty.

Also, not quite the same thing, but in a bit of a crossover to the Malay post, apparently reduplication may occur in some indigenous Australian languages as well, which has resulted in place names literally repeating themselves.

Miss Biro, I have consulted my dictionary of place names and it is utterly true. *Penn is Celtic for hill. You add the Anglo-Saxon hyll (apparently "explanatory") leave it to get slurred for a few centuries and you get Pendle. And then you add hill.You've no idea how dull dictionaries of place names are. I have, officially, lost the will to live in anywhere other than Quendon.

My favourite book of this and possibly any other Christmas is Mark Forsyth's A Short History of Drunkenness - The Spectator

Sparkling, erudite and laugh out loud funny. Mark Forsyth is the kind of guide that drunks, teetotallers and light drinkers dream of to explain the ins and outs of alcohol use and abuse since the beginning of time. One of my books of the year. Immensely enjoyable. Professor Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads

A Short History of Drunkenness is this year's Châteauneuf-du-Pape of Christmas books, no less. Bloody entertaining. - Emlyn Rees

Sometimes you see a book title that simply gladdens the heart. Everyone I showed this book to either smiled broadly or laughed out loud . . . This is a book of some brilliance - Daily Mail

With a great eye for a story and a counterintuitive argument, Mark Forsyth has enormous fun breezing through 10,000 years of alcoholic history in a little more than 250 pages. - The Guardian

Well researched and recounted with excellent humour, Forsyth's alcohol-ridden tale is sure to reduce anyone to a stupor of amazement. - Daily Express

This entertaining study of drunkenness makes for a racy sprint through human history - history being, as Mark Forsyth wittily puts it "the result of farmers working too hard". - The Sunday Times

This charming book proved so engrossing that while reading it I accidentally drank two bottles of wine without realising. - Rob Temple, author of Very British Problems